Yahoo Pulls Deceptive Anti-Abortion Ads

If you Google or Yahoo-search "abortion clinic," what do you think comes up?

Until recently, in many parts of the country, a search for "abortion clinic" directed you to ads that read "abortion clinic" but were actually anti-abortion organizations in disguise. In 75 cities and markets around the country, Internet users regularly saw advertisements for Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), groups dedicated to convincing women to carry their pregnancies to term. CPCs use deceptive tactics and sometimes tell outright lies, posing as abortion clinics, degrading and chastising women seeking terminations, and giving women inaccurate information about abortion. If you were to Yahoo-search "abortion clinic Chicago Illinois" last week, you would see this ad:

One problem: The "abortion clinic" advertised isn't a clinic at all. It's a CPC.

NARAL Pro-Choice America wanted to change that, so they went to Google and Yahoo and asked the companies to make sure that advertisements were accurate, per those companies' existing ad guidelines.

"We know that the CPC strategy is to get women into their facilities by any means necessary and then use whatever tactics they can — lies, shaming, humiliation — to talk women out of making their own decisions," Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, told Cosmopolitan.com. "It's not that CPCs can't advertise. Of course they can. It's about truth in advertising, and that customers can trust Google and Yahoo to provide them with accurate information about what they're seeking."

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Last week, Google agreed. And yesterday, Yahoo got on board, too, and said they would take the deceptive ads down.

While CPCs do offer limited support to pregnant women — a pack of diapers here, a pamphlet about social services there — their primary purpose is to talk women out of abortion. Lying, many CPC employees seem to believe, is justifiable if the outcome is that a woman doesn't terminate her pregnancy.

They use a variety of tactics. Some offer ultrasounds, despite not employing medical professionals capable of fully reading the scans, so they can tell pregnant women, "That's your baby" — and sometimes even tell women they're further along in the pregnancy than they are in order to dissuade them from terminating. Others offer made-up or exaggerated information about abortion, claiming the procedure poses much more serious risks than it actually does. Many clinics deter women even from using contraception. Most are religious.

Some states, including New York, have tried to regulate CPC advertising even off the Internet so that CPCs cannot claim or imply that they provide services they do not. But in others, your tax dollars fund the centers. That's part of the reason Hogue and NARAL are pushing for transparency and honesty in advertising.

"[CPCs] should be clear about what their goal is, which is to talk women out of having abortions, and often, talking them out of using birth control too," Hogue said. "If they're proud of what they do, then they should be honest about it. [Now] when they're searching on Google and Yahoo, women who are very specific about what they are looking for will have a much higher chance of being directed to the options they are seeking. That's a win for women's health care. It's a win for women's empowerment."